Effective Interpersonal Communication for Business

Overview

To be successful in the workplace, you must be able to effectively communicate and cooperate with coworkers and external people. The typical students of this course will be business professionals who want to enhance their communication skills to interact more effectively with superiors, colleagues, team members, customers, and vendors, and ultimately improve their overall job performance. In this course, you will use a variety of methods to communicate effectively with people in many different roles in an organization. You will: • Interact productively with others in the workplace on a day-to-day basis. • Build positive relationships with diverse individuals. • Consider organizational communication systems. • Communicate with peers. • Communicate with supervisors. • Communicate with external people. • Communicate during conflict and change.

Syllabus

Interacting with Others

To be effective at communicating with other business professionals, you need to have some core knowledge about how the communication process works and some core skills in verbal and nonverbal communication.

Building Positive Relationships

Now that you have learned about core verbal and nonverbal communication skills, you are ready to learn about the ways you can use them to build relationships at your workplace. Communication involves at least two people, and the more sensitive you can be to recognizing similarities and differences between the other people and yourself, the more likely it is that everybody feels they have been understood.

Considering Organizational Communication Systems

Now that you know how to build positive relationships with individual coworkers, you can turn your attention to learning about the ways that communication works within the network of relationships that exist within a company.

Communicating with Peers

In the previous lessons, you learned how to interact with others and build relationships in an organizational context. In this lesson, you will learn how to use those skills to communicate with your colleagues who are at the same level as you in the organizational hierarchy.

Communicating with Supervisors

Now that you have learned how to interact effectively with your peers, it is time to focus on the other group that plays a big role in workplace communication, supervisors. The unequal nature of the relationship requires careful communication tactics.

Communicating with External People

Now that you have learned how to communicate with the people within your organization, you will turn your focus to communicating with the critical people that all businesses require for success—customers and suppliers.

Communicating During Conflict and Change

You have learned a lot about communication in the workplace with different groups, both internal and external. This lesson focuses on the communication challenges that come in times of conflict and organizational change.